In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent reflects on how Catholic apologetics has changed in the past forty years and what that means for the future.
Transcript:
Voiceover:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Welcome to Free For All Friday here on The Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. On Mondays and Wednesdays, we talk apologetics and theology. On Friday, we talk about apologetics. Just for this Friday. Well, who knows? We may return to it in the future. But Free For All Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And there’s a lot of different subjects I enjoy broaching here on Friday, but the rule is if I like it, I’m going to talk about it, and you might like it too if you enjoy listening to Free For All Friday.
So I want to talk about apologetics because I was at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, how long ago was that, two months ago. It was back at the end of July at the Defending the Faith Conference. It’s hosted on campus. Scott Hahn is the keynote speaker and organizer. Lots of other speakers were there. I think Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers is there. Lots of people. It’s a great crowd. I really enjoy seeing them, and Patrick Madrid was there. So Pat has been obviously involved in apologetics since the early ’90s.
One of the founding fathers, if you will, of neo-Catholic apologetics, how it’s come about in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It’s always great to be able to chat with Patrick about all kinds of things. He was teaching a course on apologetics at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, but he’s recently retired from that and I kind of got to take over the mantle. So I teach three courses on apologetics at Holy Apostles. They’re online courses. I teach moral apologetics, Catholic apologetics, and the new atheism.
So those are the courses that I cover. It’s always a joy to be able to cover them, see bright students who are really grappling with these arguments and these issues. I usually have them read material from atheists or Protestants and critically engage it. So I’ve really enjoyed that and it’s been nice to take over that mantle of what was once Pat Madrid’s course. What I’m teaching is he transitions into different phases of his life. So Pat was there at the conference and he gave a talk on how apologetics had changed from 1988 to 2023.
I didn’t get a chance to see the talk because that was a absolutely crazy travel schedule for me. I did the Whatever Podcast right before it. So I flew out from Santa Barbara, got into Pittsburgh at midnight. Let’s see, I flew from Santa Barbara-Dallas, Dallas-Pittsburgh. Got there at midnight, wrecked the next day. I missed the Friday talks, but I was there in time at least on Saturday to give one of my breakouts, and then I gave an additional makeup keynote session Sunday morning.
So I talked with Patrick a little bit about his talk and it got me thinking just about how apologetics has changed. Now we’re coming up on it’s really been about 40 years of the new apologetics and wanted to offer some thoughts on that just to see what you all think of everything. So we have to remember Catholic apologetics is something that has been done for 2,000 years. It’s not something that Karl Keating and Catholic Answers invented in the late ’80s. We have apologetics going all the way back to the beginning, right?
The Acts of the Apostles talk about how Apollos and Stephen could dispute people in the synagogues and not be refuted. Paul was disputing people. He had the apostles engaged in apologetic disputations with their critics. When you get to the second century, you have a genre of Christian authors called the apologists, those who were defending the faith usually against charges that it’s a threat to the Roman Empire or that it’s a nonsensical faith that people who care about philosophy should just ignore.
That’s what they cared about. So you have Quadratus. You have Athenagoras. The most famous in the second century though would probably be Justin Martyr, the patron saint of apologists. He wrote two defenses of the faith to the Emperor of Rome, and then he wrote a dialogue with a Jew, Rabbi Trypho, so dealing with apologetics with pagans and apologetics with Jewish critics.
And of course, apologetics steams on through the next 2,000 years dealing with heretics, the Aryans, the Pelagians, those who are denying the real presence of the Eucharist, even in the 10th century, engaging Eastern Orthodox after the Great Schism, Protestantism in the 16th century, and then the rise of rationalism and secular humanism in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the early part of the 20th century, you had the Catholic Evidence Guild, Frank Sheed, Sheed and Ward, Sheed and his wife, Maisie Ward.
They would go to Speaker’s Corner and they would debate people. And they had this Catholic Evidence Training Guild Outline, and it was a really solid apologetic group doing stuff similar to what we even do today with the impromptu debates and dialoguing with people. So that was the Catholic Evidence Guild. Actually Catholic Answers a while ago published their old training outlines in a nice hardback book. I don’t know if we do the hardback anymore of those in the classic series, but we did publish that.
You can find it as a PDF online. But then after the Second Vatican Council, a lot of people thought that apologetics was antithetical to ecumenism that, well, if you’re doing apologetics, it’s not really great to have these dialogues with non-Catholics to reach common ground with them. Now, obviously, ecumenism and dialogue is a good thing, but it’s not an end in and of itself. The goal is to help everyone come to know Jesus Christ and be in full communion with his church. Ecumenism and dialogue has its place for that, but it is not an end in and of itself.
And unfortunately, a lot of people in the church today treat it that if we just have a great dialogue with non-Catholics, then we’ve accomplished everything we want to accomplish. That’s not the case. We can’t control conversions, but we should be planting seeds and praying for the conversions of all people. So that didn’t really change until the 1980s. You have the rise of Protestant fundamentalist churches, these Protestant mega churches, that saw it as their goal to evangelize Catholics.
Their goal was to get as many Catholics as possible to leave the Catholic faith and to get “saved” by coming to these Protestant mega megachurches. And Catholics had never heard a lot of these arguments before about how Peter is not the rock. The Greek word there, it doesn’t mean rock, it means pebble, or all these different things trying to say, oh, well, Jesus couldn’t have meant that he was literal because he also said, “I am the vine. I am the branches.” All these standard Protestant arguments that are put forward.
So what happened? The story’s been told a lot. You might even know the story if you’ve listened to Catholic Answers enough. Karl Keating, the founder of Catholic Answers, got these fundamentalist tracks on the car windshields at his Catholic parish. He goes home, writes a reply, puts it on the windshields at the Baptist Church that did this. He rented a PO box and called it Catholic Answers. And then people sent him a lot of angry replies, but other people said, “I liked what you wrote. Do you have any more stuff?”
He started creating more tracks after that. I think he wrote for The Wanderer maybe was the name of the publication. He was writing these tracks about Catholicism. Those are eventually put together in a book called Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” by Bible Christians. Then in the ’90s, you have the growth of Catholic radio, Catholic radio starting out, and I think they actually had plants at the beginning because they’re worried nobody was going to call in to ask about Catholicism.
And that was huge, that Catholic radio really helped to spread apologetics. The work of people like Jimmy Akin, Patrick Madrid, Karl Keating. You also had in the early 2000s Tim Staples, and that’s when I think he came on board with…I think he was at St. Joseph Communications and later Catholic Answers. And so during the ’80s and ’90s, you have the goal here is really to deal with Protestantism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses. The main concern were Protestants leading people out of the church.
That starts to change in the late 2000s though, and we start to see a rise where Protestants and Catholics start to work together more on social issues like abortion, the rise of so-called same-sex marriage, atheism. That was a really big change, the rise of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris. I think a lot of Catholics were caught flatfooted. They were used to engaging Protestants, but now the growth on the… We also have the internet here as well. So Catholic radio in the early 2000s reaching a lot of people, but the internet was a real game changer in that.
I mean, you had the internet a while back. Karl Keating was, I mean, a man ahead of his time. He registered catholic.com when the internet was still in its infancy. That is amazing. How much do you think the Pope would want to pay to have catholic.com and it redirects to the Vatican? They’ll never sell it. They shouldn’t sell it. It’s a great domain name, but the internet allowed Catholic apologetics to start to spread more. But we really fell behind though. Christians in general did. Atheists made huge inroads on the internet, Reddit, forums, YouTube.
Atheists don’t really have a place to hang out communally, so the internet sort of became the Church of Atheism. And I think, as I said earlier, Catholics got flatfooted, caught flatfooted, not knowing how to necessarily respond to atheism, some of these more moral arguments, defending scripture, the resurrection. And so when I was brought on board to Catholic Answers in 2012, December of 2012 was when I was hired, I told them I really want to focus on the non-Christian issues like atheism and abortion, Bible difficulties.
So the very first books I wrote were answering atheism, persuasive pro-life, Hard Sayings, because there was no book on Bible difficulties from a Catholic perspective. No comprehensive book. There are a few small ones, Father Most had one. Mark Gizak had a smaller book. Matthew Ramage, more of an academic book, but no comprehensive book on the subject then. Hard Sayings was the first one to do that. And so that’s something I wanted to focus on because we weren’t engaging people.
One of the first things I did to audition for Catholic Answers was I did a why are you an atheist show. It was in September of 2012. And I did that and I bet you I could find it. I’m going to try to go find that show. That’d be a neat little retrospective. My very, very first time on Catholic Answers. So I did the show and they were really impressed with how I engaged atheists. I was just this, how old would I have been, 27? Yeah, it was 2012, because then 2013 I was 28. Laura and I got married and we thought we were going to work in the diocese of Phoenix.
And then I said, “Nevermind. We’re going to go to San Diego and work at Catholic Answers.” Lived in our crummy little apartment. I think it was like $1,300 a month for this crummy apartment. There were drug dealers nearby. At San Diego, the best you can afford, right? Now I think that apartment costs like $2,900 or $3,000 a month. Absolute insanity. Glad we don’t live anymore. So one of the changes obviously is the change from Protestantism to more secular, moral apologetics, alliances.
Protestants are coming to Catholics, seeing how they’re engaging this stuff and saying, “Hey, this is really interesting.” That’s what I’ve tried to do is make stuff so that even Protestants are interested in it and want to use these arguments, especially on pro-life stuff to engage other people. I’ve had people say, “Hey, I’m Protestant. Obviously I disagree with you on the Catholic stuff, but I really like the work you’ve done on abortion.” They say, “Hey, if it can save lives, if it can help people, I’m all for that, man. Let’s work together.”
What are some other changes though? We’ve got more access to material now for better or for ill. So if you go back to Catholic apologetics in the ’80s and ’90s, you got to get books. You got to do interlibrary loan. You have to really track down these fathers. A lot of it’s going to be the old Schaff Collections and sometimes hardback form. Now, you had CD-ROMs. You had some CD-ROMs and other electronic catalogs of these things. But for the average person, it’d be expensive to get a lot of this stuff, so it would be harder for them to come by.
So to find some of this work, you had to put in the legwork for it. So what could end up happening is that you end up instead of finding the original Church Fathers on something, you quote somebody else, a secondary source, and sometimes they get it wrong. I’ve still seen citations from this time period of the Church Fathers that are actually incorrect or citations of things that don’t actually exist. So you got to be careful of that. So it’s great we can go out and we can find this stuff, but it’s also easy to find things that are erroneous on the internet.
So you really have to be careful. When I try to cite something, if it’s a father and I see it cited on a website, I always do my best to go back. I use a key term search, try to find it on New Advent, Schaff Collection. Not all the Church Fathers are in Schaff or New Advent either. New Advent is a Catholic encyclopedia, Catholic website, Philip Schaff was a 19th century anti-Catholic Church historian, but he has a lot of good collections obviously of the Fathers, but I’ll search for it. Not all the Fathers are translated.
Some of them you can only find them in academic monographs, like some stuff from Origin and others. It hasn’t been translated yet. So it’s definitely a lot easier now to find stuff, to find other academic works. We have a treasure trove of information available that would’ve been a lot more difficult to access in the past. So for better or for worse, we have that now. It’s a big difference. We also have access to what I would call instant public feedback loops. So in the ’80s and ’90s, you’re doing apologetics, right?
You say something on the radio, or you write a book or an article. Whether it is successful or people have criticisms of it, you won’t hear about that until someone writes a letter to the radio station, publishes an article in response in a journal, mentions you in a book they write a year or two later. And so the feedback and sharpening the argument, if someone makes a criticism, you say, “Oh yeah, that’s kind of a weak argument. I should shore it up here,” it takes a lot longer for that feedback loop.
And then they see what you’ve done and then they respond. And so you could see in the ’80s or ’90s, it would take several years. Now, over a course of a few weeks, you’ll do something on YouTube, a response video, somebody will do a response to that. You do a response in return. You can get instant feedback from things. And so I think that’s helpful to cut down the time gap there to allow for a greater precision of the arguments.
Now, it’s difficult because you can have dog piling, you can have things where people all jump in and the criticism’s not helpful, or it goes in a million different directions. Sometimes it isn’t helpful in that regard. But in many other cases, I think getting feedback quicker to strengthen arguments over time I think is overall a good thing that we have now. Another difference is a wider playing field. It’s easier to get started in apologetics, and that’s true for anything, whether it’s comedy or music.
There was a time where you had to have an in. If you wanted to be known as a Catholic apologist, you had to have an in at the radio station or at Ignatius Press or at a big magazine to get your name out there to distribute your tapes of your conversion. But now with YouTube, you can just upload stuff. And if it’s really good, in many cases, word of mouth will share it and people will get to know about it more through that. So we have this far more now where if you want to do apologetics, you don’t have to join an organization.
You can get started right now. And if it really serves people and is unique and helpful, I really think that word of mouth will spread it and you’ll see a lot of fruit from that. And it’s a great way to see if apologetics is something you should do part-time or full-time. That you’ll naturally, as you’ll start, if there is a demand for it, people will want more content, will support it. They’ll financially support you. You don’t have to join an organization. You can support yourself with something like Patreon, for example, or Locals I guess is the more popular one now.
So I’m excited to see more people getting out there with their material. And by the way, if you are doing apologetics and you really want to break out and reach and help other people, and if God has gifted you at this, what’s great about the internet now is that we have way more debates and dialogues than we had in the past. If you go back to the ’80s or ’90s, to do a debate on Catholic Protestantism or other issues, it was a big affair. You all had to fly in to a location and set it up and record it and the audio is usually terrible.
The video was grainy. I still love watching those retro debates that are uploaded to YouTube for more people to see. But you would do it. And then at the time, of course, it wasn’t only the people who went to the debate heard it or who were willing to buy the tapes later of the debate. But now with the internet, those classic debates have reached more people. But with the internet, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to fly to a particular location.
If you are just starting out with apologetics, if you are able to handle yourself in a dialogue or a debate with a competent non-Catholic opponent, that can really show, hey, this person has a lot of worthwhile things to say and they’ve proven themselves. And so you can just appear on someone’s channel. Just go on Skype or Zoom or StreamYard or whatever, and you start and you go. I want to see more people. I mean, I’m getting older, folks. I’m going to be 40 soon. Millennial. I’m right in the middle of everybody.
Gen Z is coming up the ranks, and I’m seeing great Gen Z people who are out doing apologetics on social media, on TikTok. That’s the other thing that’s changed, short form. Not just YouTube. YouTube’s for old people like me. TikTok, you have social media apologists reaching… Some of my videos might reach tens of thousands of people. I know Catholic apologists on TikTok, they’re reaching millions of people. I’m still very ambivalent though towards TikTok because I don’t like Communist propaganda, and I don’t like TikTok in general.
I feel like it hurts people’s brains. But if you can give them stuff that edifies them, maybe it is worthwhile in some respects. So seeing that we have more debates and dialogues than we’ve ever had before, I think that that’s great to be able to see. And that’s what I talked about, by the way, on the National Catholic Register. They interviewed me recently on the changes in apologetics in electronic media, and I mentioned the proliferation of debates and dialogues. I think that that is a very good thing.
So if you want to get out there and make yourself, hey, I want more people to notice what I’m doing as an apologist, if you are gifted in that area, try debates. If you’re not sure, just debate someone who’s not as well-known. If it doesn’t go well, hardly anyone’s going to hear about it. But just try. It’s kind of like with boxing. You start in the rookie leagues, and you get your chops in, and you start climbing the ladder in the tournament, so to speak. And then you might engage other more notable people if people say, “Hey, he or she has a really good handle on the arguments.”
And actually I’ve seen some great Gen Z apologists, men and women, who have been doing debates, being on Modern-Day Debates. So that’s very encouraging to see. I have come full circle though. I try very hard to not do Skype debates. I really like sitting across the table or standing across the stage with someone in person. There’s something you can’t replace about that. So I try very, very hard for my debates to be in person now, because I just really enjoy it. That’s the only travel I’m really doing anymore is for these debates and dialogues.
I’ve got one with James White. We’ll do that in person in Houston. Allie Bostock and I will do that in person on her podcast hopefully in November. So very excited about all of that. But what’s great though, I will only do a debate in person if it is recorded and put online, because it’s a lot of work and it wouldn’t be justified to put in that much work for only a few hundred people to watch it. If it can go online and thousands of people can see it, then I think it’s well worthwhile in that regard.
That was just my thoughts about how apologetics has changed coming up now on 40 years of the new apologetics and who knows where it will go in the next 40 years. But I’m really excited and I definitely want to now change my focus into training the next generation to pick up the mantle and to continue to provide a reason for the hope within, but to do so with gentleness and with reverence. 1 Peter 3:15. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
Voiceover:
If you liked today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information , visit trenthornpodcast.com.